Globe and Mail
June 1, 2001

Canada’s Export Development Corp. has come under fire for helping finance the Urra dam, which has displaced thousands of members of the Embera-Katio tribe in northwestern Colombia.

(Excerpt)

Imagine this, Warren Allmand said on the phone from Colombia: motorcycle gangs terrorizing Canadian courts, police and governments into dropping charges against their members.

After hearing four days of spine-tingling stories in war-ravaged Colombia, that was the image that came to mind, the former Liberal cabinet minister said. He’s heard tales of Indians who pursued legal claims through the courts and then were threatened and killed by right-wing death squads. He’s also heard about prosecutors who were warned to back off cases that involved right-wing paramilitary groups.

“It would be like the bikers in Canada telling the government what to do and getting away with it,” Mr. Allmand said, Ottawa’s minister of Indian affairs in 1976 and 1977. “It’s unbelievable.”

As president of Rights and Democracy, a Montreal-based research and advocacy group, Mr. Allmand is currently in Colombia to highlight the plight of Indians caught up in political violence and look into Canadian companies’ activities there.

Colombia’s Indians are frequent victims of the complex battles raging among government troops, leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary groups. An estimated 40,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in the past decade — often after being accused of supporting one side or the other.

During the past week, Reuters reported two massacres in the province of Cordoba, a stronghold of paramilitary groups financed by landowners.

Local authorities said 24 peasants were killed near the town of Tierralta, most of them beheaded with machetes. Another 11 were attacked and killed on the weekend while canoeing down a river.

Both massacres were carried out by the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), authorities said.

Most multiple killings are attributed to right-wing groups.

Canada’s Export Development Corp. has come under fire for helping finance the Urra dam, which has displaced thousands of members of the Embera-Katio tribe in northwestern Colombia.

Several Colombian Indian representatives met with Mr. Allmand and three Canadian native leaders this week, among them the country’s only elected indigenous governor, Floro Tunubala of the southern province of Cauca. Mr. Tunubala has also received death threats, Mr. Allmand said.

His trip reflects Canadian human-rights groups’ and foreign-policy watchers’ growing interest in Colombia, whose conflicts threaten to spill over into neighbouring countries and currently pose the most serious security threat in the Americas.

Canadian investment in Colombia includes oil, mining and telecommunications projects. Human-rights groups and a Colombian mine workers’ union say massacres carried out by paramilitaries have sown terror among peasants and miners who are opposed to foreign firms’ activities.

Attention is focused on the southern province of Bolivar, where guerrillas and paramilitaries have battled for the sympathies of local residents — and the proceeds from small-scale production by independent miners.